Gadgetory

let's look at a program today that is free it alleviates that base roll-off problem that plagues a lot of on board audio users out there it can also help with tinnitus dramatically if you are a headphone user and last but not least it can give you a general overall volume boost or it can boost those footstep frequencies in those competitive FPS games this is equaliser apo and i'm gonna be doing a full tutorial today with it's a sister program room EQ let's get it on welcome back to tokyo city ladies and gentlemen today is going to be quite a big tutorial but a lot of it as well as going to be me explaining why and that's a big reason and i want to explain why because if I don't I'm sure there's going to be people in the comments going why why why why why and so I want to avoid that anyway first things first the reason why I came into this program is because I was recently testing new motherboards on the x99 line namely the gigabyte u d4 when that came through and I tested that with my other headphones and it was causing tinnitus problems and they tested with my razor carcases and if you guys have followed me for a while you know that my razor carcase is never caused tinnitus problems in the past but when they started causing tinnitus problems with the u D for I knew something was wrong with the audio solution on the motherboard itself and so I started doing a lot more research about it and essentially what I came to was an interesting find in that there a lot of onboard audio devices will cause a thing called impedance mismatch and what this will actually cause your headphones to do is pick a frequency rather exaggerate a frequency than it's what it's used to playing so if we look at two different frequency response curves here from the same headphones for instance my Fidelio L ones we can see here the inner fidelity they've got a frequency response curve like this for the Fidelio ones but if we look at the graph right next to it from a different website digital versus you can see there's this massive spike at around seven and seven and a half K but looks of it and so what we've got here is the same set of headphones with two different frequency response curves which one should you trust I honestly after following in a Fidelia for a while I'd be trusting their graphs and their reviews because they seriously know what what they're talking about when it comes to audio and they've got the right gear to measure things I'm not saying that digital verses don't have the right gear but I'm saying in this case it looks like there's most likely a impedance mismatch here with this frequency response curve and so a lot of people using onboard audio are probably having this problem and they're not even knowing about it when they in bed they've got tinnitus problems because of this impedance mismatch and today equalizer APO the first thing it can do is alleviate this problem by essentially dropping the the levels around here around 7k or completely cutting them down which I did and it'll give you some relief from tinnitus however to test if your headphones are indeed doing this and this is how I discovered it I went to a website called audio not calm and I'll put all the links and for all the programs and all the websites I'm using today I'll put them in the description below but essentially what I did was I got my SPL meter and I did a full slowly increase frequency at full volume here across all the different ways here is you can probably hear it in the background but essentially what it caused me to do is it caused me to find that real big spike around 7k and it happened on this onboard audio solution the asrock extreme 6 but it really it happened a lot more like it was huge on myut for was like 10 decibels above any other frequency around this 7k mark and so what this caused just cause my ears absolute ache until I figured it out so I'm glad I figured this out and I want to share this with you guys because I want you guys to take care of your ears anyway once we've done that we can so we've done this we've found that we maybe have a impedance mismatch on our headphones we then will want to install equalizer AP oh and I'll put the link in description below for that but just essentially just open it up install it I've already installed it and once you install it you can go to your Start menu and you I mean when you're installing it it will it will give you the option to go to configurator and what you want to do here with configurator okay can you open for me now it's open there just didn't come up automatically what you want to do here is you want to go to speakers or select the output that you're listening to so for instance I'm using my speaker out here this output so I will select this one and APO will be installed on this and then you click OK and then you restart your computer and so once you restart your computer you then go down to the bottom right corner and go to playback device and what you have to make sure is right click here on your speakers the one that you're using go to properties and then go to enhancements and make sure none of these boxes are checked so essentially because it's a basically what this is is a EQ that works pretty much on the driver level it's really lightweight and it's really good so once you've done that you click OK and now the program is ready to go essentially so this program is ready to work now we can essentially head to the just go to this PC head to wherever its installed usually its installed in Program Files C Drive Program Files equalizer APO I want you to open that folder I want you to go to config and then go to config dot txt this is the main configuration file to equalize APO users so it's a text-based equalizer and the benefits to this is really lightweight but there's also disadvantage in that it's kind of hard to get your head around it and there's a slight learning curve also I'm going to talk to you guys today I'm going to explain the program to so you can get using so you can be using this awesome program 2d and it's free I mean what more could you want so once what I like to do is well I like to create a shortcut to my desktop as you can see already done here because this is the main config file so once we're ready to go we can open this up you can see here that I've got my preamp setting -6 DB so I'd like to have more control of my volume I find this settings pretty much perfect one thing you can do straight away with this program if you don't have enough volume you can just give it a 12 DB boost if you want to although you may come into some clipping but especially if you're listening to things that have been recorded say 12 decibels below the limit you can give it a 12 DB limit and you'll have louder volume essentially out of your audio but for me I like minus 6 that gives me perfect control from 0 to 100 on my onboard audio you guys might want to give it - more for instance if you've got the gigabyte UD 4 which is just extremely loud then you might want to go -12 like I did when I had that when I was using that motherboard so essentially you can play around with the volume straightaway with this setting and to you guys that's one thing that's the first benefit of using this program the second here is that you can include more settings for certain situations so we can see I've got a rock setting that is just essentially adds a little bit more and I'll talk about a little bit later and we've got a Call of Duty setting here so I'm going to this is another benefit of this program you can essentially pick those footstep frequencies so you can hear footsteps and gunfire easier so that's a huge benefit of this program I guess let's move on now to the equalization settings which is easily the most important part of this program and that is the filters here so if you guys want to just copy/paste my settings you're more than welcome to us with all my tutorials I'll put these settings in the description below you can just copy them if you want to but I'm going to explain what they are so filter 1 & 2 this is basically alleviating the bass roll-off but in my case this comes pre-installed with the program by the way but in my case I'd like to give it a little bit more so I like to give it 6 & 3 that gives it a nice little bit of low-end sub-base and a little bit of a bass boost there which I do really appreciate I'm a bit of a bass lover but I love mids the most but I like some good bass - oh yeah anyway we move on to filter sorry that should be filter 3 and filter for anyway filters 3 and filter for these are the settings here that are the ones that take away that 7k tinnitus killer so basically this you can copy/paste this but I like to do a high shelf so I'll go through what these mean PK is basically parametric so you can set what frequency you can set the gain you can set the bandwidth of that frequency so you can see here 20 Hertz that's low-end as we get start to go into 8,000 that's high and that's treble the gain there 6 DB is going to give us more volume - 6 DB is going to give us less volume Q once this is the bandwidth of the octave in the actual equalizer Q is really wide Q value of 1 is extremely wide a Q value of say 9 is pretty sharp and so if you guys want to do different EQ settings you got to play around with the Q settings and I'll put a link in the description below that goes more in depth on Q settings but just understand that one is a really wide bandwidth of the frequency curve say for instance nine is really sharp just remember that so the higher you go the more sharper it is in relation to cue so anyway once we go to his high shelf HS so the next setting high shelf basically just shelves up it goes up shelves those frequencies up or down as you can see here I've done a high shelf so after a certain frequency it'll shelf it up so after six thousand eight hundred what I've done here is I've made a shelf that goes down and we'll take it down by 6 dB and then I made another high shelf frequency so after this eight thousand three hundred it'll go up 6 dB so essentially I've chunked I've just cut out the body of 6800 to eight thousand three hundred by six decibels there's other ways you can do this you can do it via q1 if you want to smooth it out more you can do it actually that's kind of like the two only ways you can do it you can do it low shelf if you want to do it the opposite way eight thousand three hundred but basically there's different kinds of EQ settings there's shelf settings there's the parametric one there's also a high-pass filter and a low-pass filter as well which will completely cutoff the frequencies before or after those certain points so I will put a link in the description below that goes in more in depth about the settings if you want to understand them but hopefully this is just a basic basic quick how-to on these frequencies so once we've done that we can save that and now we're going to look at for instance these include ones so if you take this number off you can do it a few ways you can just miss print the file name if you don't want to have it on I just like to do the normal way that's put the number mark in front of the include and then you go to rock here and you can see here with rock this is my rock setting so I had to give it a bit of a little bit of a boost there on the preamp so I give it a 3 DB boost there and I like to do a parametric EQ at 1000 Hertz of 3 DB with a wide bandwidth and just 5,500 again 2 DB and it just gives it a little bit more of an edge to my rock when I listen to it I like these settings personally I've just played around with them quickly and this is what I like for a rock it sounds really cool you guys can copy that if you want to for rock though depending on your headphones again you're going to want to test these things with your headphones next one I wanted to talk about is Co D this one here at caught so I've done a little I've opened up a little thing here that I've done here so basically what I did here and I'll put these two folders in the actual video so you can hear them yourselves but here we got card this is the first once I copied some of the footage from the game I then went press play and I boosted it at 1k and so hopefully you can hear this is flat so I'll let you guys hear it for yourselves and so what we've got here is you can essentially copy some of your game footage put it into an EQ like Adobe Premiere Pro and you can analyze and sort of find out what makes the footsteps easier to hear grab those EQ settings for instance point to one octave we can then go to Google I've got two here go to this setting I'll put this in the description below - you can then type this in 0.21 calculate and that will give us a cue setting to whack into equalizer apo for COD and so we can see here I've got it here Cod footsteps 1000 Hertz 20 DB bass Q value of 6 and it looks like it's 6.8 and so essentially what this will do is it will do exactly what we did in the video give us that real big boost to those those footstep sounds so if you guys want to get an edge in your in your actual arm video games the FPS especially you can use this program to give you a boost to those footsteps okay so that's equaliser API in a nutshell this concludes the first half of the tutorial basically it can give you more volume in certain situations it can fix that bass roll-off that play a lot of onboard audio solutions mine included it can help reduce tinnitus dramatically and then it can give you a boost in certain games there's probably some other things you can do with this program I'm still I only just got it a few weeks or actually about a month ago and I've been testing and playing around with it and I really like it but this is the basics of equalizer Apo let's move on now to the second part of the tutorial which is a room EQ okay so room EQ this is a program that you'll have to go to a forum and register for if you want to download it it's optional it is a little bit difficult to use and before we get into this part of the tutorial I will say that you will want to have good gear if you want to get good frequency response curves out of this program so here I've only I'm only using a shure sm58 and so the the frequency response curve i get out of this mic might be different because this might not be actual fully flat mic who knows right so essentially and i know because i've got DB meter here and i actually tested it and it gave me different results so if you want to get a frequency response curve out of room eq they're going to measure it with the mic and you're going to use your headphones to put the volume into the mic and going to do a sweep and that will give you a frequency response curve then you can edit the eq in room eq and then export it as a text file so let's go into that this will be the second half of this tutorial quite long I know but I hope you guys enjoy it so this is room EQ basically as soon as you've installed it and opened it it'll look like this now first thing you want to do is if you're going to use this program to equalize your onboard audio you'll want to turn off all your filters that you've enabled in equaliser API basically you want your onboard audio to be flat right because what we're doing with the first thing well I'm showing the first thing you can do with room key or the first thing I'm going to show you is that you can check your onboard audio actually that what's coming out of the DAC and so what we got here is go to great click on preferences at the top right corner and then set your output device and input device to whatever's going to measure it so basically connect your speaker cable from your headphones and then plug it into your line in and see what this programs going to do is is going to measure the actual onboard audio itself and so once we've done this we can then set our volume levels and then set our line in so I just leave mine at 66 basically that's fine for this test I left my output volume at 66 and I left my I actually turned my sorry this is the wrong one this is microphone I've actually got to go to line in and change that to a hundred so that's at 100 and my output volumes at 66 so once we've done that we've check the settings we can go back to preferences and we go to next and we want to make sure all these levels here are the same so keep changing your volumes around so you've plugged your output your headphone out to your line in directly as I showed in the photo before all these levels are the same click Next and basically what this will do is this will measure your onboard audio as you can see here you can see straight away that's just on the measurement there this is what the realtek onboard audio solution essentially plays before it even reaches our headphones before it even gets converted into or it's actually an analog signal but this is the analog signal it's giving to our headphones essentially and as you can see here there's that bass roll-off you look there before 50 Hertz there's that roll-off and that's I mean it's a lot better I'm going to save the real tag 11:50 over at 20 kilohertz we can see the roll-off there that's not such a problem since I don't know any ears or my ears I can hear up until 19 kilohertz and it's pretty I'm pretty insensitive to those frequencies anyhow but yeah you know basically Golden Ears might want to drop it up to 96 kilohertz but even then so you can see here that starts to roll off at the 20 gasp normal but what we're worried about here is that 50 Hertz that pre-roll off there so that's I mean essentially that's a problem but this is what equalizer apo essentially fixes when we turn on our filters right we're just going to turn on our bass filters here I'll also enable my usual filters so you can see what's going on but essentially we're going to re measure we're going to remeasure this now so we've put our filters on and we're going to re measure Calla recalibrate the recalibrate the device or repeal rate the onboard audio we're going to see what we get this time around so I've applied my filters and I just want to show you what equalizer does and how it alleviate the onboard audio the bass roll-off anyway so what we can see here is a dramatically different result now as you can see here this is essentially what's coming out to my headphones now and this is how I like using my headphones every day now because that dropped as you can see here straight away we see there's a nice big bass boost there I love that we've also got so you see the bass Roloffs practically non-existent now it's actually quite the contrary and so we've got more bass this time around and over to the right here we've got less you know that drop there to edge off those frequencies so just comparing it to the standard this is my adjusted settings and equalizer Apo as opposed to the standard there so the bass roll-off sprint pretty much completely fixed which is great and then we've fixing those harsh frequencies caused by that impedance mismatch so this for me is essential now that I use on now that I started using equalizer Apo absolutely love it and for me it's essential and so I can't not use this program any more now I know what it does so I recommend you guys get a little bit of a bass boost there from equalizer a per at the very least to alleviate that space roll-off that's caused with the standard onboard audio solution so this is just the first thing that room EQ can do one of the basic things and one of the basic reasons for showing you the first half of this video because once I analyze it I was kind of like yeah well now I understand what people are talking about with base roll-off completely because I measured it myself and this is the results it's giving me here so anyway let's move on now to the second half of this tutorial where we will be showing you how to EQ your headphones with room EQ you've probably seen all these fancy graphs people showing you how to do it but they don't go in-depth on how to do it and so what I'm going to talk about is how to go in-depth and how to use room acute EQ your headphones so this is the second part of the tutorial where we're going to use our microphone to eat get an equalization curve of our headphones and then we're going to edit it in room EQ so again like the first part we turn off all our filters here connect our headphone out to our line in and then we once we've done that we can then go to spi meter click here on the SPL meter setting and then we can go to calibrate and basically what we want to do is we want to calibrate our listening level to microphone that's recording and so we can just use the re W speaker signal there have our headphones right up to the microphone or wherever you pretend the microphones your ear essentially that's what you're going to be doing pretend that microphone that you're recording it with is your ear and then you match it and I do suggest normal listening levels as well what you usually listen to music at so those volume settings as well that's I would suggest around there but once we've matched the SPL meter there we can do a frequency sweep and so go up to measure so you click on measure there after you've done with SPL meter you click over the top left corner measure starting frequency 50 Hertz is fine and frequency a 10 kilohertz that's fine as well for our levels it - level at DB frequency sweeps fine there - 12 1m that's that's the longest sweep and then I usually do two sweeps even the more the better I mean I'm just for this tutorial I'll just do one sweep so essentially that's just one time it's going to play all those frequencies through I do suggest doing it a few times and now while you're doing this you will want to be very careful not move anything don't if you move your headphones that'll change the way the frequency comes out of these headphones now because essentially right if you if you were putting a headphone on your ear and you move your headphones around right what happens rather sound coming out sounds a bit different so it's the same thing it's hard to get a really accurate representation of the actual frequency response curve and so I mean what's hitting your ears might be different to what even a professionals using on their test dummies right so here I clearly stuffed up so I'm going to do it again but the more times you do it the more I guess if you do it a lot of different times you'll eventually get an average of what it should sound like and now another problem with this is that as I said might have said before but I'm only using an sm58 this is just a normal voice microphone it's not a professional microphone for analyzing frequencies and so I'm pretty sure that gear a bit of money I mean if you're using I'd say a condenser microphone would be better so if you've got a condenser microphone then it would give you more of an accurate representation I believe but again this is the problem I have at the moment I can't get a fully accurate representation of the frequencies here as you can see before as I showed you before when I was measuring with my DB meter at around 2k that you can see there the 2k bumps actually bigger than the 7k bump but when I was using my DB meter the 7k bomb was 8 DB higher than around 2k or something like that so I'm gonna trust the DB meter because that's that's actually the one I've got to actually got really good reviews and it's been known to give out accurate results so once we've done that we can click Save As anyway save as Fidelio l1 I'm going to save that frequency response curve there and then we're going to go up to the right top right corner and go click on EQ and essentially this is the part where you'll got a graphical user interface and this is why people like using this because you've got a GUI but you want to go to equalizer some basic settings change that to generic because generic settings is what equalized API uses the actual other program that actually implements these EQ changes the other settings as for the other settings our speaker type you can just leave that on full range and as for the other settings don't really you don't really need to touch them because we're just using the EQ and the graph here to equalize what we've got so essentially once we've done that we can go to click on the actual EQ filters button there and then we can click on manual so this will bring up a range of different settings here we click on and we want to change all these to manual I mean you could leave them on auto give that a try if you want it just I know equalizing a EPO is a manual program so personally I'm going to change them all to manual and there's actually 20 of them I need just showed you 10 so you scrolled you want to scroll down and change all them but what we can start doing here is go to PK that's parametric EQ and I'm not going to explain all the different types of eq's that's up to you guys to do yourselves but just going to explain the program here so you can see here I want to drop say the 2200 frequency curve even though this frequency curve is wrong and I know it's wrong and I've measured it incorrectly I'm just going to show you how you can use this program let's just get on to it this is just a how-to anyway so say for instance you had the perfect gear and you did the EQ right then you could then load that into here and you can start as you can see here you can change the put manual controls in there and then change the frequencies and as you're changing them room EQ will give you a visual representation of what the new frequency curve is going to look like so we're dropping the gains down we're dropping the Q values down that'll give us a more broad a broad EQ more of a broad EQ the higher the Q value the more sharper the EQ change will be the lower this Q value is the more wider it will be so just keep that in mind and so octave is actually if he's using the octave settings that I showed you before it's actually kind of the opposite and so I have put a link in the description below if you are wanting to change those values into Q values you can do that with that changer anyway let's look at here so what we're essentially what we're doing is I'm just doing a quick rough really rough as guts I mean this is really rough so it's really draf I just want to show you how you can use this program here obviously you want to take more time if you want to get a flat risk frequency response curve and you'll probably want to get some good gear if you really do want to get a perfectly flat EQ out of you're out of this program so maybe if your friends got a good condenser microphone say like an 82 or 3/5 or something you could borrow that just to EQ your headphones then that will give you a pretty good representation but keep in mind though that you have to hold your headphones in the right position and you don't have and you don't want to budge you don't want to have any external noise affecting this EQ curve but once we've got a good EQ curve representation here we can just change it around as you can see as I'm putting in these values I'm giving certain frequencies of boost I'm taking off levels from certain other frequencies here it's starting to get more flat so that the solid Green Line is our original EQ the lobe light that the faded green is our new EQ curve and so I'm pretty happy with that and just for example you guys might want to spend a lot more time with a lot more filters but we just click on save as and I'm going to say that LOL one so once I'm finished with this frequency cue here I can just save as and then type in Fidelio l1 sorry for the cut I just had to get the door the postman was there anyway let's continue so once you're done there you can just save it as Fidelio l1 so save it as a dot rec file initially and this will essentially what this will do is it'll apply the settings to your EQ so you close that down everything's good to go now though we don't have a text file yet but what we do is once we're at the main menu here we can click on file export and we can click here filter settings as txt so I'll do that again click on file export filter settings as a txt and you can call out Fidelio l ones or whatever your headphones are called whatever you want to call the file so save that as a txt file I'm just going to call Fidelio one EQ and then we can go to our desktop here and we can just check to make sure these settings are there so once we're on our desktop check here and we can see all the settings that we applied in that EQ in room EQ are ready to go now for we can just copy that into config dot txt or we can rename this file config dot txt if you want to use do it that way so that's it or we can do it you can just put it as an include file in your config dot txt if you wish to so there's a few choices you can do with equalizer API but essentially that's all there is to it guys that's room EQ with your headphones let's move on now to a conclusion so that's it for today's tutorial I hope you guys enjoyed it a lot if you have any questions please leave a comment the comment section below and if there's anything you wish to know more about these programs then please let me know as well and I'll try and help you out as much as I can again though I'm not the master of both these programs I'm just doing a basic how-to with them I've still got a little bit to learn with them but they're absolutely phenomenal programs especially since they're free and in my case they fix my tinnitus problems and they just gave you know they give that nice boost in rock they're good for games they fix that bass roll-off and I mean it's just a phenomenal program I'm really impressed with it especially the equalizer Apo room EQ that requires Java to use you know requires a lot of time if you wish to get the right EQ settings for your headphones but it is a powerful tool and especially as you saw in there I could measure the actual roll-off on the onboard audio so it's great I'm going to be using this program more when I do motherboard reviews I can measure crosstalk with it I can measure the frequency response curves of the onboard audio with it as well so a great little program there so you guys I hope you enjoyed this tutorial please give it a big thumbs up if you did like it and I will catch you with another tech video very soon and I sorry I've been gone for a week in a bit I've just been really busy as usual you know work Peaks and then I try to get a video done for you guys when I can and this is that time now so I'll catch you guys when I'll take video very soon anyway peace out for now bye